Thursday, March 15, 2012

Social media sites get a lot of criticism slung their way — sure,
they connect people (virtually , at least), but can they really
serve as a stand -in for the complex, face -to -face relationships
that have defined humanity for thousands of years?

As she scanned through her list of
626 Facebook friends last New Year’s
Eve, Tanja Alexia Hollander began to
deeply consider this question. Who
were these people, really? How did
she know them? What did they mean
to her? And could she truly classify
them as “friends?”

To seek out the answers — or, at least,
to edge closer to understanding the
complexities and superficialities of
friendship in the 21st century — the
Auburn, Maine-based photographer
didn’t just send out impersonal
emails or post comments on walls.
She literally sent the worlds of the
real and the digital colliding into one
another by making a plan to meet —
and photograph — every one of her
Facebook friends.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Are You Really My Friend? The Facebook Portrait Project by Tanja Alexia Hollander

On New Year’s Eve of 2010, Tanja Alexia Hollander sat at home
(yep, she stayed in on New Year’s Eve) writing a letter to a friend
recently deployed to Afghanistan, while simultaneously instant messaging
another friend working on a film in Jakarta. The dichotomy between the
old and new forms of communication got Tanja thinking about friendship
and its relationship to Facebook and other forms of social media. She
wondered, What is friendship? And is it photgraphable? She decided to find out.

Through fundraising, and grant support, Tanja got the funds necessary
to begin her photographic quest. In March of 2011, the Westbrook-based
photographer embarked on an ambitious, and very much “information age”
project: to connect with all her Facebook friends in real life, and take
their portraits. With 626 Facebook friends, I’m not kiddin’ when I say
ambitious.

Now, just over a year into the project, Tanja has been to 16
different different states and photographed around 200 of her Facebook
friends. “People are really excited,” she told me, “They cook for me,
offer me drinks. Moms are the best. They give you stuff to-go.”

Monday, March 5, 2012

A focus on faces, familiarity, and Facebook

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

February 26, 2012|By Mark Feeney

What could be more familiar than your friends? Except that Facebook,
having turned the word into a verb, has made the concept so elastic as
to lose meaning. This alteration provides the inspiration for

“Tanja
Alexia Hollander: Are You Really My Friend?’’

Facebook is and
isn’t about friendship. How many of your “friends’’ do you even know?
More to the point, it’s definitely not about images. The face you choose
to present to the Facebook world is a kind of social resume. It can
include an image, or images, yes; but also name, employer, academic
background, all that other stuff in your profile.

The original
Facebook, the Harvard Freshman Register, was about images. It was like a
high school yearbook with this crucial difference: It looked forward
rather than backward. Not a few future power couples had their origin in
one party scoping out the other’s picture in “the facebook.’’

What
Hollander has done is use the facial aspect of Facebook friendship as
her point of departure. Since January 2011, she’s been engaged in an
ongoing project: to go to where her Facebook friends live and photograph
them. That’s a lot of traveling. She has more than 600 friends.

The
results are on display at the museum in two sections. One consists of a
long horizontal strip of 61 portraits pinned to the wall - unframed,
giving them a casual, immediate look. Around the corner, there are
several dozen more photos. They have a magnetized backing, and viewers
are encouraged to arrange them on the wall as they like. It’s
interactivity of the old-fashioned, dimensional sort - literally
hands-on.

The photographs are in color, shot indoors and in natural light. The
interest they afford is more conceptual and sociological than visual,
though that interest proves to be limited. While Facebook provides
Hollander with an armature for her project, that project really doesn’t
offer much in the way of commentary on or insight into social media. As
for sociology, sameness limits its utility. The people appear
comfortable, both socially and economically. A gathering of Walmart
customers this isn’t.

Hollander’s sitters are in the 99 percent,
all right, but the part that considers itself culturally and morally
superior to the 1 percent. They may well be right in assuming so. For
that matter, you and I (the sort of person who writes art reviews and
the sort of person who reads them) are likely in this same social
sub-stratum. But pretty soon the realization dawns that that means
you’re looking into a lot more mirrors than windows. Facebook, Facebook,
on the screen, who’s the fairest on the scene? The question answers
itself, which is one reason Mark Zuckerberg’s so rich.

PORTLAND, Maine — If you were to make a map of all
your Facebook friends, what would it look like? How would you organize
it? By location? Gender? Age? Closeness of relationship to you? And what
is a friend? What does it mean today, when the word “friend” can as
much mean someone you’ve known since kindergarten as a page on a website
that belongs to someone you met once, or never?

Auburn photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander
has lots of friends on her Facebook page — around 800, to be exact,
from Maine to New Zealand — some of whom she knows intimately and others
she knows only in passing. But as Facebook sees it, they’re all her
friends, regardless of circumstance, and in that spirit Hollander has
set out on an ambitious project: to photograph every single friend of
hers on Facebook. This work in progress is being shown in an exhibition
titled “Are You Really My Friend?” at the Portland Museum of Art, running through June 17.

“I know, it might seem like a crazy thing at first,” said Hollander, a Portland native and a co-founder of the Bakery Photo Collective
in the former Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook. “But it brings up so many
questions about friendship, and what social media and networking does to
the idea of what makes someone a friend.”